Summary of the game informer article

• Whether playing as Chief or Locke, you're accompanied by a fireteam of 3 A.I. which you can command/issue orders to in the campaign
• Highlighting an enemy and hitting up on the D-Pad orders your team to assault an enemy
• Other commands include picking up certain weapons, using turrets, driving warthog, etc
• AI teammates can revive you as well
• Confirmed: Linda, Kelly, and Fred join the Chief
• Game starts out before Chief is on the run
• Audio has been heavily reworked from the ground up for Xbox One (bullet sounds, debris, etc)
• 8 months after Halo 4 ends, cataclysmic events are tearing apart star systems, these are tied to the Guardians (Forerunner entities shown in the first teaser trailer)
• Game Informer played the second mission, taking command of Chief and Blue Team to take back an ONI research vessel abandoned for 2 years
• Team banter replaces interactions with Cortana to flesh out the characters
• There are multiple routes to take in levels
• The zealous religions Covenant are slowly abandoning Jul M'dama's leadership in Halo 4
• Halo 5 will launch with over 20 multiplayer maps
• 15 DLC maps by June 2016
• All maps will be free
• Teases a "completely new, epic multiplayer experience" they'll reveal at E3. Incorporates "all aspects of the Halo sandbox for the first time ever"
• No splitscreen campaign, 2 players for multiplayer splitscreen only
• This MP experience is described as a "dream of ours and all our fans to build something like this"

Link to the article

I for one am pretty happy about just about everything here!

That guy from Buffy is back.

@bigjeffrey said:

That guy from Buffy is back.

I thought that's the guy from firefly?

(Shitty joke but I had to do it lol)

I don't have an Xbox One yet but Halo is a big draw for me. I might end up caving and buying one for it in the fall if it ends up being good. That being said, I haven't been paying attention to the pre-release marketing at all except the first trailer with Master Chief in the desert with a robe. Reading some of these story related bullet points makes no sense to me and I've played all the main games (although I'm not as big on the lore around it as others).

@bigjeffrey said:

That guy from Buffy is back.

Needs more graffix

I half-wonder if that implies some sort of Titanfall-style bot co-existence with competitive multiplayer.

Audio in the beta was top notch, some of the best sound design I've ever head. (Battlefield has some good audio too) FREE Maps is damn big, I bought Halo 4 season pass and played them all at release but they never came up after that. Glad to see everyone will have access to them. I think they are teasing HALO: BATTLEFIELD BTB (I hope). A.I teamates, reach did that alright, at least now you can tell them what to do.

@bigjeffrey: Yeah, the free DLC is a breath of fresh air, I've always sort of felt ripped off by the map packs because it has always been so hard to find people to play on them.

The squad control thing is very unexpected but great to hear. Feel like that's been neglected in a lot of shooters when it is usually really fun.

And wait so there will be the usual DLC maps but all free? That's great.

More info

Incineration Cannon is back and has changed compared to Halo 4. players can charge up a shot and the longer you charge, the more powerful it is. Battery based rather than ammo based.

railgun is back from Halo 4 and works almost identically - could hold up to 11 shots

Overshield was present had some weird screen effect when you picked it up - looked like a bug

boltshot is back but doesn't work like halo 4 - no shotgun fire mode. fires two shots at once and sort of tracks players

suppressor is back and fires a lot slower

blue outline on weapons was in the build

killcams were disabled in the build, could spectate players while you were dead

br spread was near-gone - fired so fast

spartan chatter was reduced hugely, less pointless callouts

killfeed modified to be like this: "PLAYER NAME" "WEAPON KILLED WITH" "PLAYER NAME"

pistol RoF is modified to be slower but is a lot more powerful - competes with AR and BR

ground pound is harder to use, radius is tiny

overshield was bugged, my shields said i constantly had it even after death

On Graphix

Question

Railgun's got some wonky-ass texture work going on. I'm assuming it's low-res or incomplete.

Answer Frank O Connor

It almost verbatim the beta code. So I would basically ignore everything you're looking at.

Leaked out (Part of close network test)

Weapons models kinda look placeholder?

Scope change (Beta Scope)

BIGGEST NEWS YET

spartan bro moments cut down. game ending segment is just your spartans walking towards the screen, no more highfives and shit

RIP Spartan Bros

Took long enough to get that Republic Commando sequel.

squad control is great news. reasons to get an xb1 just went up for me.

i can't imagine switching my multiplayer focus from destiny back to halo, but nonetheless i'm also glad if that spartan bros thing is true.

LINDA KELLY AND FRED OUT HERE PUTTIN IN WORK.

I did book reports on the first three Halo books in 5th grade. I'm 21 now. Putting these characters in this game now, in 2015, sounds preeeeetty dumb. But maybe a kind of dumb I can get behind.

@asherv20: yes please!

GameInformer has been so nice as to put up the cover-story on their website: Click here!

It sounds pretty cool, but this part was very interesting and might explain the Republic Commando-esque nature of the squad commands:

After Halo 4 launched in 2012, 343 Industries shuffled its staff around. Halo 4 creative director Josh Holmes was promoted to internal studio head, and he then recruited Tim Longo to take his place on Halo 5. Longo cut his teeth at LucasArts, eventually becoming creative director on Star Wars: Republic Commando. He then spent several years at Crystal Dynamics working on the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot and eventually returned to LucasArts as creative director on an unannounced Star Wars first-person shooter. When Disney bought the company, two years of work on what was likely a Republic Commando sequel were trashed and Longo brought his sci-fi shooter pedigree to Halo.

Also implied Republic Commando 2 was canned by Disney. Boo Disney.

20 maps!! Wow that is so good to here!

I was so unhappy with the lack of Maps in Halo 4. 10 maps and then i believe 3 of them, the forge maps, weren't even in the MP map rotation. So basically it shipped with 7 maps.

This really sounds like it will turn out to be an incredible game.

@bigjeffrey: but i liked the bro moments... spartans fist bumping and shit is funny

More

MORE

http://www.readyuplive.com/halo-5-guardians-assets/nggallery/page/1

Nice to see Halsey, I was kinda worried that she wouldn't show up in Halo 5.

What I am looking forward to most is an even better Forge mode. I still remember all of the crazy experiences with friends messing around in it for the first time in Halo 3. Halo + sandbox has been one of my quintessential parts of my video game life.

The successful push for the de-broing of the game is the epitome of "no fun allowed" criticism. I thought it was sorta cute. Oh well.

Oh god, i'm getting so excited! Haven't been this excited for a video game since Mass Effect 3. Just want to see this game in action, can't wait for MS E3 presser.

I really don't care either way but it did seem weirdly out of place. But I am also the person that hated all the Destiny Ads with Bros bro'ing it out being bros, bro.

@village_guy said:

Man, this reminded me how much I dislike Game Informer cover stories. They're like the puffiest of puff pieces, just measured enthusiasm with absolutely no critical voice. I mean, that's the nature of most previews I guess, but at some you start to wonder why they even exist? There's literally nothing about that story that couldn't have been done by 343 PR and posted on Halo Waypoint.

Anyway, the game sounds cool and I'm glad they're shaking things up a bit. I really, really liked Halo 4, but it felt remarkably restrained, as if they were afraid to tinker with the formula too much.

I thought it was dumb and a bit anachronistic, but you have to give them credit for trying to inject a little personality into things.

@conmulligan: @evilsbane: I mean, sure, it was silly looking. But I can't imagine another franchise where that sort of attitude is more appropriate than Halo. I think trying to make Halo more "serious" like that, in addition to scrapping local splitscreen co-op, it sort of blind to the audience they're making this game for.

I was actually getting pretty excited about this game until I saw this. If I can't play co-op with my Brother or multiplayer with him and are buddy, then this is now probably just gonna be on my wait till big price drop or sale list.

I'm getting more and more excited about this damn game.

I thought the beta had a really distinctive look and feel to begin with, and the fact that they seem to be emphasizing the "future military space war with human characters" angle is much more interesting to me than Halo 4's rehashed "ancient aliens / cycle of destruction / you are the chosen one" thing.

And squad mechanics! And allusions to some kind of large-scale battlefield mode in the multiplayer, maybe!

It seems like they're going all out! It's nice to finally have a game on this generation that feels like a big deal.

(As far as the bro-ness goes, as someone who's been playing Halo since the beginning, I definitely thought it was the wrong kind of goofy. I'd much rather they put your team on a podium and give you full control in third-person for ten seconds. A screen full of Spartans spinning around, shooting guns in the air, meleeing each other in the face, while jumping and crouching repeatedly.)

I have a theory as to why Chief goes rogue.

Okay, so hear me out here.The campaign level that has been shown is the second level in the game, it takes place in an old Oni station. There is a screen were Blue team seems to be approaching a high ranking Elite major of some sort, looks to be one of Jul's guys, but they're not aiming at him, they're simply scanning the room. there is a 2 second clip from that cinematic at the beginning of the first game informer video.

My theory is, Blue team is set to the base to do whatever it is they're supposed to do. Late into the level they are stopped by a high ranking Elite lieutenant, he tells them he has something very important that they need to know, that Halsey is with Jul, that Oni ordered her to be killed. Blue team doesn't believe him, they're skeptical, this Elite tells them that the computers within this very station have the files to prove it, that they only need to dig in a little deeper, Blue team is taken aback, they are reluctant to disobey orders but the Elite has a video showing Halsey with Jul, she proclaims that Oni sent a Spartan IV to kill her, Chief, Kelly,Fred, and Linda see her missing arm, they're shocked. They dicide to dig deeper to indeed find proof that this is not a ruse but Jul.

Upon finding the truth they decide that Oni is no longer on their side, that they do not have humanity's best interests in mind. They take it uppon them selves to find the truth about everything going on and protect humanity how they see fit. They take it upon themselves to find Halsey and figure out what to do next.

I really don't understand the term bro? How do you act when you're with your friends? You don't joke around make fun of each other and just mess around? What is exactly bro'ing out? Is it just fist bumping and high fives that annoys gamers?